1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a history information recording apparatus associated with product equipment and to product equipment provided with this history information recording apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, product equipment such as audio visual equipment (hereafter referred to as AV equipment) is furnished with a warranty card. This warranty card generally provided in a sheet of paper, describing product-associated information such as model number and serial number and sale-associated information such as sales office and date of sale. Based on the description of the warranty, the product is generally warranted for free-of-charge repair service within its warranty coverage of one year beginning with the date of sale for example.
From the viewpoint of users, this warranty card must be stored separately from the product. However, this sometimes present a problem of losing the warranty card. In addition, since the warranty card is made of paper, its surface may be contaminated with fungi or otherwise depending on the storage condition, making the terms of warranty and other printed information smudgy and illegible.
Although the product-associated information is printed on the warranty card before the shipment of the product from factory, the sale-associated information is provided at the sale of the product. To be more specific, a rubber stamp bearing the name of the store and the date of sale is impressed on the warranty card. However, this sometimes presents a problem that, if the date of sale for example is not impressed by the store intentionally for some reasons, the manufacturer has no means for identifying the date of sale. This poses a risk for the manufacturer to sustain damage from servicing a product with its warranty coverage expired. Moreover, if the date of sale is not identified, statistical product control after sale on such as product life and mean time between failures cannot be performed correctly.
Further, if each product has history information such as distribution history including arrival and shipment dates and names of wholesalers along distribution channels and repair service history including date, particulars, and personnel of servicing, in addition to the above-mentioned production information and sale information described on the warranty card, these pieces of information are useful in the production control after sale. However, ordinarily, these pieces of information have not all been recorded on each product.